Luke, as far as young children went, was chaos incarnate.

Vader spent many a night falling asleep beside him in increasingly uncomfortable positions before the boy got to sleep himself. He would chase him through the air vents of the Executor for hours, panicking with every thud, hating the way his breathing echoed absolutely. He couldn't hear his son's giggles over the rasping—when he turned it off, momentarily, he could hear the laughter chiming. As worried as he was, it eased his soul somewhat.

Then Luke disappeared.

He had been kidnapped. Vader knew it. He had received no ultimatums so far but he knew he'd been kidnapped, and he knew by whom: he'd interrogated several Alliance operatives on his ship who'd been caught. They'd given him nothing, but the security holos and data proved they'd let the Rebels onto his ship, they'd let the Rebels—

He did not stop raging. Everyone, Piett included, was on tenterhooks around him, the Emperor had punished him severely for his insolence and distraction, but he did not stop raging. Rebels he was interrogating exploded before he touched them, bases were wiped out instead of captured, and with every step he left a trail of bodies in his wake. He never stopped raging.

If he stopped raging, he started hurting.

Nothing pierced the haze of fury. Not competence, not logic, not pleas. Nothing, until—

The sound of laughter in the vents again had his head snapping up.

"My lord?" Piett asked warily—it was a miracle this man had survived so long already, through no fault of his own, so his fear was justified—but Vader ignored him and kept listening.

The giggling sounded again.

Piett's eyes blew wide and he dropped the datapad. It cracked; Vader didn't see it. He tilted his helmet back farther and listened.

The bridge fell silent.

And the clear peals of laughter chimed out, reverberating through the metal.

"Is that…?" Piett asked, and Vader said nothing, but relief flooded him, because he had heard a lot of laughter in the weeks Luke had been gone, and none of it had been audible to anyone but him.

Vader growled, "It may well be," and stalked off the bridge.

What was happening? Had Luke's kidnappers been hiding on the Executor all along—that was insulting, if so—and if not, had they snuck back on? How?

…had there been no kidnappers at all, had Luke just got lost, had Vader failed to find him and left him alone in the filtration system, scared and cold and lonely…

He strode through the hallways, as fast as he possibly could, casting out his Force presence and reeling it back in to see what he caught.

Luke.

Luke was there!

Luke was… moving, through the vents, roughly from Hangar 1706 to… their quarters.

Luke's presence was in his childhood bedroom.

Utterly, utterly confused, Vader stormed in—only to be drawn up short.

Luke was sitting on his bed, with the spaceship sheet and his TIE fighter model… except he wasn't holding it. It was flying around his head, chased by his X-wing model, and Luke wasn't sitting straight on the bed, he was sitting on—

"Ahsoka," Vader growled.

Ahsoka glanced up—she had definitely heard him come in, and was just being dramatic about the delayed reaction—and said, "Hey, Skyguy! I brought your son back!"

Luke beamed at him, and—despite his shock, horror, disgust, everything, at the situation—Vader felt his heart melt a little bit. "Auntie Soka rescued me!"

Auntie… Soka…

"You," he growled, "are a Rebel."

She shrugged, though she was anything but casual. That… that was Ahsoka, alright, laughing in the face of danger even when she was afraid. "Still. I wasn't about to let them do anything to your son. So I brought him back."

Luke reached out a pudgy hand. "Come play with us!"

Vader, despite his reservations, was helpless to refuse.

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